I Do Art

by Barbara Torke

    Every day I wake up, get out of bed, and do art.

    This makes my day go better. It makes me organize. It gets rid of those niggly worries awakened to at dawn or three a.m.

    For years I did Julia Cameron’s Artist Way writing. I used collegiate notebooks and filled them with page after page of thoughts, curses and  trivia. I’d wake up, get out of bed and write. When Dale came along I found this difficult. 

    I still don’t know how working people, or coupled people, keep a creative mind set going  and make a living, other than commercial 9-5 work. For me, art is multi-layered. Much of it is the illustration of observations, the capturing of moments and activities, and the investigation of emotion and materials. This I can process. This I can do. It’s the creative stuff that I find difficult. The dangerous experimentation that might frighten me - or some one else - and often does. Dale is supportive. I have learned how to seize my day. 

    The more I paint, the more I see these levels. There are times I can paint and carry on a conversation with other people at the same time. There are times I can instruct, and there are times I can ignore whatever is going on around me. But there are also times when I want to keep the whole experience private. Then amidst that, there are those times I never want to share, and those I always want to share. There is a gestation period. There is also a fermentation period. Sometimes art must ripen, other times rot. 

    When I get up and sit at my desk now, at this time in my life, I expose my day to those parts of my being at a variety of levels. I explore and jiggle a lot of my brain cells around to fall into ordinariness, or more probably - reality. 

    Writing journal pages, I found I could never re-read (bad penmanship - incomplete thought sequences) when I returned to it later. I know I had some ideas I wanted to pursue, but often couldn’t find them - or read them -or understand them. I also took a quick look at the possibility of someone finding  these incomplete and sometimes nasty, boring pages and saying OMG. 

REGALTombow pens drawing on Robert Bateman sketchbook. Regal watercololor marker 10"x8"

I have changed the Artist’s Way of journaling to a less internal, less angry, more accepting style. The visceral is sometimes still dark and slimy but less abrasive. All writing and painting is open to interpretation. In fact, everything I put out into the world (including the way I dress, speak, stand, communicate) is open to interpretation. Not one person in the world will understand me in the same way as any one other person in the world will. I am a part of this ungodly awkward group of people known as humanity - and of every other animal, object, plant and piece of gravel in it. Including stardust. Poetry, painting, collage present flashes of my persona. 

    There’s not that hidden elusive ‘’What is she thinking?” element. 

    The only person I can truly be guaranteed to please, then, is myself.

    I get up in the morning, brush my teeth, and sit down at my desk. And do art.

    I do a drawing with markers, pen, pencil, or paint.

    I write a poem, a short essay, or a saying.

    I cut apart, or use objects i’ve found, or that matter to me, and make a small collage.

    Sometimes I do a very small pastel (an Artist Trading Card size  - 2.5 x 3.5 inches)

    Every Day. Sometimes twice. 

    Some days it takes an hour. Sometimes two. Sometimes 20 minutes. 

    But I do art. TAOS MOUNTAINArtist Trading Card: pastel painting 2.5x3.5, on art spectrum of Taos Mountain, Taos New Mexico. Taos Mountain, pastel ATC 2.5"x3.5" 391. SPARKYSparky had a hard time of it. He was a stray I adopted, Some Turkish van in his heritage. He lost an eye due to an abscess, had diabetes and asthma. With shots and care he lived for a happy 12 years and was adored. 3"x5" collage. Sparky 3"x5" collage 

Texture surrounds us. I don’t like the scratchy tags of my soft fleece sweater. Some foods have the wrong texture on our tongue--like okra. And some have the right texture--like ice cream. 

In painting the painter is constantly challenged to show texture. It is truly a vital sense. Most people are very tactile. Watch mothers with babies, shoppers in the produce section, children with kittens, men with guns. Well, you get the picture.

I walked around Confluence Park searching for texture examples. My senses were bombarded. Canada geese trampled the sky. Snow geese rattled above my head. Nuthatches, mountain blue birds, sparrows trilled at many decibels. Thickets of branches encased me, marbled trunks of trees surrounded me. Leaves below and clouds above created a cacophony of texture. The wires on the hanging bridge were rough on my hands, snagging my new made-for-iphone texting gloves. Even the squirrel in the branches gave some softness to the scene. Some of the texture samples are below. I saw, felt, heard and tasted the day, a little bitey, a lot awake. I even ate an apple to even out the senses, and only thought of the taste of bark and little Russian olives. 

Childhood has its textures, too. Long slow  days filled with idle oat grass tumblings, random cat tail explosions, flights of fantastic weavings of dreams and wishes. Stormy keeps picking her way through past and pleasure, forming a tapestry both nostalgic and tightly woven.

Stormy Weather was born on a thundering, rainy night. Queen, a little Welsh-quarter horse mix, was upset by the weather, but nature has its way, and we had the filly. Queen had long white mane and tail, and Stormy had this little brush of a twig, a butch hair cut, and knobby knees. Queen was my sister Sallie’s and my pony, that we rode around the farm, up to the lake, to the post office, down to the Platte River, and to visit our friends. Sallie is seven years older than I, and by the time I was ten she didn’t ride anywhere on a horse.  She could drive, date, all that good stuff. By the time Stormy was two years old Sallie was ready to trade  my white Easter gloves for Stormy’s front end. I figured I was lucky to get the rear end in the first place.

    Stormy took the place of Queen as soon as she was broken. I’ll admit she was never well broken, but she was mine, and I loved her soft nose, and the way she blew onto my hands. Her back was broad and cushiony (fat in vet-speak.) There is nothing that is as silky as a pony’s muzzle. Her hooves were hard and smooth, sharp little hatchets to the careless. Some horses are rougher to the touch, bony and lumpy to ride, and they have poky long whiskers on their nose. Queen was long haired and old, very old in horse years. When I looked deep into Queens brown eyes, I could see an oval pupil, deep and dark, surrounded by a fringe of iris—the texture of velvet, a pool of horse-secrets.

    We always rode bareback.This gives a lot of emphasis to the feel of soft horse hair, coarse mane, jeans under the sandpapery bridle rein. Wearing jeans, every twilled thread created hot and scratchy texture against my skin. My dad feared us catching a foot in a stirrup, and being dragged to death. Saddles are hard anyway, but how could I become a real cowboy without tooled leather under my jeans? Actually I had some spectacular falls. Queen was notorious for throwing anyone over eight years old. Then she’d stop, her hoof very close to my body, and blow around the clumps of grass she chewed to show she didn’t care. I knew she did. If she had wanted to leave, all she had to do was hold her head to the side and split. She did that a lot, too.

    Stormy and I spent many hours together. I hated housework, wanted to be outside, so I brought the milk cow home from the pasture every day.  I fed calves from a galvanized milk bucket. Feel that seashell rough metal? It was my job to ride to the Post Office, a mile away, for the mail. No out door job was beneath me.  I shelled corn, hard field corn had to be thumbed off the ear for the pigs and chickens. Papery lips around the kernels were rough and dry. I even caught and dealt with the Sunday dinner rooster.

    Along the ditch banks, beside the Platte, were wonderful moments for my friends and me. Lazy times I’d lay back on Stormy’s rump and watch the clouds as she ambled. Mostly though I sat, legs dangling as she kicked the dry leaves aside and we rattled along the autumn-laced lane. Splashing cold water on my face I saw the dimples of  drops on the creek, and felt the deceptive silkiness of the moss, like a mermaid’s hair, in the seep ditch as she drank. It was soft and curvy, as it floated towards the South Platte River with a gentle farewell wave. Bark of cottonwood rubbed against my jeans, when I’d take a break from the sun and lean against a tree to smoke a candy cigarette. As we wandered by the river old dead trees created decks my friends and I lounged on. They were smooth and silver, with an occasional prickle where a twig had been. 

    I reached down and touched fence post wood, weathered and grooved, as we rambled, caught the cotton in my hands, felt the rough shells of milkweed pods, the smooth grid of the pheasant’s feather.

...Part two in the next installment